Saturday, October 07, 2017

The
tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green
thing that stands in the way . . . to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature
is Imagination itself.

– William Blake

Inside
the horizon of every line, green is looking for green. The eye of eye is green.
Closing my eyes, I gaze out looking for you through myself, and I grow green.
Greenness of the eye of the heart.

It
is not a simple thing to think this greenness. The matter of color is so
mysteriously specific, an appearance stronger than its own fact. How to grasp green
without following thinking into falling for seeing it as color of, without losing its real quality among the vines of
association? It is a question of understanding greenness according to its own
literality, of reading it like a letter, of spelling it like a word.

This
one may do by staying with the hyperliterality and non-arbitrariness of Blake’s
image, its itself-ness. Here, where truth is seen right on the surface, the
tree is not simply an example of nature as imagination, but its very likeness,
its species. Nature is a green thing that stands in the way because imagination
is green. Thus we approach inversely a
properly intellectual vision, that which “touches on things which do not have
any images that are like them without actually being what they are.”[2] Such hyperliteral seeing may
be conceived as a vision through no one, via the deep-flat immediacy of a
paradoxically questioning presence ‘who’ apparently already understands, as per
Augustine’s well-known reflection on time: “What is time? If no one [nemo]
asks of me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone asking, I do not know.”[3] This nemo (from ne + homo) is the inhumanity of a too-close vision
that touches, plant-like, what it cannot see precisely by simply seeing it. It
is an order of understanding requiring precisely that no one ask the question, a non-asking asker ‘who’ is the presence of imagination itself, its
species. So we find in Michael Marder’s fortuitous formulation of our blindness
to plant intelligence the perfect corollary to Blake’s tree of imagination: “Imagine
a being capable of processing, remembering, and sharing information—a being
with potentialities proper to it and a world of its own . . . most of us will think
of a human person, some will associate it with an animal, and virtually no one’s imagination will
conjure up a plant.”[4]

Species:
image-growth of the entity, face of an essence, appearance of true self-imitation—the
spice of being. Image (from the root *aim-
‘copy’) and greenness (from the root *ghre-
‘grow’) converge in the auto-mimetic nature of growth. Thus Goethe begins The Metamorphosis of Plants: “Anyone who
has paid even a little attention to plant growth will readily see that certain
external parts of the plant undergo frequent change and take on the shape of
the adjacent parts—sometimes fully, sometimes more, and sometimes less.”[5] Green is the species of
imagination, its spice. Imagination tastes green.[6]

To
observe more clearly the verdant idea of the image, consider Augustine’s
description of the three levels of vision (corporeal, imaginal, intellectual)
as a picture of plant-like growth: “When you read, You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:31), three kinds
of vision take place: one with the eyes, when you see the actual letters;
another with the human spirit, by which you think of your neighbor even though
he is not there; a third with the attention of the mind, by which you
understand and look at love itself.”[7] Vision greens, sprouting forth
in three unified orders not unlike the form of a plant. Corporeal, objective
vision, that which sees surface or what cannot be seen through, touches the
image as leaf. Imaginal, mediated
vision, that which sees transparently via the subtle lines seen by seeing
through, touches the image as stem.
Intellectual, immediate vision, that which sees the very form of the seen,
neither without seeing through it nor with seeing through it (or both), in
other words seeing the thing directly through itself, touches the image as root.

Once
again the specific example—the second part of love’s ‘double law’[8]—is more than example,
being specularly paradigmatic of vision as the movement and manifestation of
will. The love seen in seeing love mirrors
and is mirrored by love’s seeing per se. Likewise, the three levels of vision
are themselves conceptually evident in the conspicuous text: in the objective fact
of the neighbor (from the root *bheue-
‘to be, exist, grow’) or one who dwells near (plēsion, proximus), in the
meditating fact of the likeness (from the root *lik- ‘body, form; like, same’) between oneself and neighbor, and
in the immediate fact of self-love.[9] The neighborliness of
seeing reflects vision as a force occurring through the mirror of love, via the
first unseen image of itself—like the gap between conatus and connatus, twixt
one’s inborn gravity for oneself and the non-autonomous withness of one’s birth.[10]

The
unitary, divine fact of love—“Love is the reflection of God’s unity in the
world of duality. It constitutes the entire significance of creation”[11]—is imaginally present through
the law of love in plant form. Seen in this way, in the moment of Augustine’s picking of this example, the three-fold order
of vision becomes a revelation of the second commandment as graft of the first.
As image grows mimetically via the cut-and-splice process of self-copying into
the very synthesis of vision that sees a thing all at once in gross, subtle,
and mental dimension, so does the image’s verdant structure here expose the
second part of love’s double law as a cutting of love itself, the living image
of the will to love the One as love. “I am the vine, you are the branches”
(John 15:5).

And
in the original articulation of the first commandment, we see a similar
representation of the various levels of being synthesized by the power of a
unifying force: “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with
all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark
12:30). Likewise, Dante’s account of the double necessity of love of self and
love of God conspicuously deploys the locution of cutting (division, decision)
to express the indivisibility of amorous
vision: “Or, perché mai non può da la salute / amor del suo subietto volger
viso, / da l’odio proprio son le cose tute; / e perché intender non si può
diviso, / e per sé stante, alcuno esser dal primo, / da quello odiare ogne
effetto è deciso” (Purgatorio
17.106-11).[12]
Impossibility of self-hatred is the identical, unquestionable twin of severance
from hating God.[13]

Love
as the rhyme (from root *sreu- ‘to
flow’) flowing between sight and color: “No white nor red was ever seen / So
am’rous as this lovely green.”[14] Love as greenness of
beauty’s eye, of the image that sees,
seizing one by its look, the color of the species as flower of imagination: “The
plant that achieves only stunted flowers in the relentless struggle for existence,
having been released from this struggle by a stroke of good fortune, suddenly looks at us with the eye of beauty.”[15] Or as Meister Eckhart
says, also with respect to the extrahumanity of vision, “All creatures are
green in God.”[16]
Being the alterative of pink or rose, the generic red-cum-white of living
beauty and non-spectral color perceived as if between the high and low ends of
the rainbow (white light minus green equals pink),[17] green is the presence of
the absence of the spectrum’s unity within itself, the index of the will that curves
it into infinity.

The
self/world-annihilative power of love’s vision—“Annihilating all that’s
made / To a green thought in a green shade”[18]—concerns an absolute and
unendurable interfaciality, the divine revelation of universe as mirror. At the
intolerable summit of Narcissus’s specular torture, finally liquifying in the
fire of love—“sic attentuatus amore / liquitur et tecto paullatim carpitur igni”[19]—the lover surrenders into
the green to become a flower: “ille caput viridi fessum submisit in herba, /
lumina mors clausit domini mirantia formam” [he laid down his weary head in the
green grass and death closed the bright eyes marveling upon their master’s
beauty].[20]
In the end everyone follows their heart, dies into the reality behind beauty’s
dream. As Klima writes in Glorious
Nemesis, “But what the mind does not believe, the heart does. And in the
end the intellect does, too; what else is left for it to do?”[21]

Green
is the color of man’s most properly eyeless neighbor—the manifest appearance of
vision as a naturally missing power: “We
speak of privation . . . if something has not one of the attributes which a
thing might naturally have, even if this thing itself would not naturally have
it, e.g. a plant is said to be deprived
of eyes.”[22]
Being somewhere in the middle of the rainbow, in the midst of the spectrum
visible to humans, green reflects the heart as the omnipresent medium or
general line of being: “my heart, where I am whoever/whatever I am.”[23] It is the spectral aura
of the ghostly eros of all things, their being ( )here in all the creaturely fullness
of uncircumscribable restlessness and indeterminacy: “For you have made us for
yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”[24] So in the impressional
order of experience, green corresponds to the intensity of longing: “All thoughts, words and acts cause sanskaras or
impressions on one’s mind. Sanskaras are of seven different colors, the same as
those of a rainbow . . . Intense spiritual longing gives rise to sanskaras of
the green color. Just as red sanskaras are the worst, so the green ones are the
best.”[25] As if seeing with eyes
one naturally misses, longing grows through the distance of its own missingness
towards the presence of what would only be missed more were it present.[26]

“Seek his face always [Psalm 104.4], let
not the finding of the beloved put an end to the love-inspired search; but as
love grows, so let the search for the one already found become more intense.”[27] The search that never
ends is green—the looking of imagination itself or that which stands everywhere
in the middle with an eye for the whole. The gravity of green corresponds to
the color spectrum’s vital center, a location at once for the above and of the
below. So is the weight of every image double. Image, forever undecidably inside
and outside the eye, looks
simultaneously into and beyond one’s vision. Seeing no one, lacking the eyes
whereby it sees, the green life of imagination searches through every face,
growing beyond all someone ever seen.

As
the radically individual fact of one’s human form gives too-literal witness to
its being envisioned by one without eyes to see it,[28] so does the green reality
of imagination, this actual reflection of our missing eyes, lure one to outgrow
the fantasy of identity and rest in the limitlessness of a will freer than one’s
own—that most ancient love alone capable of creating the unimaginably new.

[6] Cf. Marder’s discussion of the
vegetal nature of imaginal freedom in terms of ‘crude taste’ of first play:
“The material freedom of imagination is the echo of vegetal freedom in human
beings, but so is the formal aesthetic play-drive, indifferent to the real
existence of its object. To let the plant in us flourish, to give free reign to
imagination in its materiality, we should forget the formality of ‘high
culture,’ which corresponds to the upper tier of play, and to abandon ourselves
to what Schiller decries as crude taste: ‘first seizing on what is new and
startling, gaudy, fantastic and bizarre, what is violent and wild.’ Nietzsche’s
Dionysian art, itself linked to the intoxicating power of a plant (the
fermented grape), is no doubt crucial to this appeal, as is Deleuze and
Guattari’s take on ‘drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us’”
(Michael Marder, Plant Thinking: A
Philosophy of Vegetal Life [New York: Columbia, 2013], 146).

[7] Augustine, On Genesis, 470.

[8] “’Which commandment is the first
of all?’ Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the
Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with
all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all
your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbor as
yourself.” There is no greater commandment than these’” (Mark 12:30-1).

[9] Cf. “There can . . . be no bodily
vision without the spiritual, seeing that the moment contact is made with a
body by a sense of the body, some such thing is also produced in the spirit,
not to be exactly what the body is, but to be like it; and if this were not
produced, neither would there be than sensation by which extraneous things
present are sensed” (Augustine, On
Genesis, 492).

[10] William Desmond addresses this
dimension—and the separation it inspires—in terms of porosity: “The conatus essendi takes shape as the will
to self-determination, but in doing so forgets its own more original passio essendi which is itself as more
intimately and vulnerably porous . . . The selving on the surface of
self-determination thus tries to snip the umbilical cord that ties it to its
own soul—and no nourishment from the womb of the porosity comes up to it, even
though in this, all its endeavor is still an affair of being ‘birthed with’ (con-natus)” (William Desmond, “Soul
Music and Soul-less Selving,” in The
Resounding Soul, eds. Eric Austin Lee and Samuel Kimbriel [Cambridge: James
Clarke & Co., 2016], 377).

[12] Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1977. [Now, because love cannot turn its sight from
the well-being of its subject, all things are safe from self-hatred; and
because there is no being that can be conceived as existing all by itself and
severed from the first, every creature from hatred of that one is cut off.]

[15] Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks,
trans. Ladislaus Löb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 36. Marder
comments: “The absence of a conceptually mediated meaning does not signal the
voiding of sense in the flower that represents nothing, but conversely
announces a shift in the directionality of sense . . . The beautiful flower
ceases to be an object of human regard, instead looking at us with the
de-subjectivated and impersonal ‘eye of beauty’ because we do not exactly need
it” (Plant-Thinking, 141). Cf.
Narcissus as bound by the impossible actuality of the image’s love of him:
“Admit it, the gaze is really too much. Who can withstand it? No one shall see
me and live. That must be why Narcissus never stops spontaneously lying to
himself about his reflection, never ceases to fall in love with his own image,
seeing neither that it is an image nor his . . . How eternally precious those
passing moments, when the gaze opens itself a little more and sees, by some
unfathomable magic or trick of the abyss which if you gaze long into it gazes
back into you (N), that the image is no less in love with Narcissus” (Nicola
Masciandaro, “On the Gaze,” in Dante |
Hafiz: Readings on the Sigh, the Gaze, and Beauty, eds. Masciandaro and
Tekten [New York: KAF, 2017], 59).

[16] “The prophet says, ‘God will lead
His sheep into a green pasture.’ The sheep is simple, and so are they who are
simplified to one. One master says that heaven's course can nowhere be so
readily observed as in simple animals: they guilelessly accept the influence of
heaven, as do children with no minds of their own. But those folk who are
clever and full of ideas, they are carried away in a proliferation of things.
So our Lord promised to feed his sheep on the mountain on green grass. All
creatures are green in God” (Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe [New York:
Crossroad Publishing, 2009], 459). Observe how the passage performs the
unifying simplicity of vision by immediately transferring the color of the
pasture to the creature partaking of it. This is a good example of what I have elsewhere
termed “animal mysticism,” wherein the stupid immediacy of animal awareness is
used to figure the depth of apophatic illumination; see “Unknowing Animals,” Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism
2 (2011): 228-44.

[20] Where others prefer the past tense
here—e.g. Mandelbaum’s “eyes that had been captured by the beauty of their
master” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans.
Allen Mandelbaum [New York: Harvest, 1993], 97)—I translate ‘mirantia’ in the
literality of its present so as capture the total liminality of this moment
wherein Narcissus’s eyes, still gazing upon themselves in the mirror of
imagination, hold open the possibility of his soul’s attainment, via death to
his identity, of a higher self-knowledge and more continuous vision of beauty. So
the greenness that receives his dying head touches the vitality of death itself,
its being an inherent mode and instrument of life rather than its opposite. As
Rudolf Steiner observed, “green is the lifeless image of life,” in the sense of
the qualitative visibility of the invisible life living through lifeless
matter: “Life itself we do not perceive. We perceive plants because they
contain the lifeless substances. And because of this they are green” (“Colours
as Revelations of the Psychic in the World,” http://wn.rsarchive.org/). Vital
and deathly, green is sign of the life that lives through what lacks it, the tint
of soul elevating itself from matter, the tone of animal growing itself through
mineral. So is it the color of love as will refusing the boundary—or encompassing
the continuity—between life and death. Like Criseyde nearly dying of love-sorrow
in Troilus’s arms: “O Jove, I deye, and mercy I beseche! / Help, Troilus!” And
therwithal hire face / Upon his brest she leyde and loste speche – / Hire woful
spirit from his propre place, / Right with the word, alwey o poynt to pace. / And
thus she lith with hewes pale and grene, /That whilom fressh and fairest was to
sene” (Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and
Criseyde, IV.1149-55, in The
Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987]).

[26] “Longing does not diminish when
the subject is present to what is missing, but rather increases” (David
Appelbaum, The Delay of the Heart [Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 2001], 143).

[28] “The prehuman forms through which
it [the soul] has to pass before it can incarnate in the human form are
innumerable. Strictly speaking there is only one form—the human form—which is
latent in all of the previous forms. The mineral, the plant and the animal
forms actually contain the human form in its latent state, and this is
gradually and increasingly manifested until it is at last completely expressed
as a human being in a human body” (Meher Baba, God Speaks: The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose, [New York: Dodd,
Mead & Co., 1973], 188).

Whim after all is a whim; and, by its very nature, it is such that “why—wherefore—when” can find no place in its nature. A whim may come at any moment; it may come now or after a few months or after years, and it may not come at all.